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That one movie. ***********FOUND*************

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l0cke said:
I know a lot of people who hate COM and a lot who loved it. I loved it, think it is a great movie. 😀
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the people who hate it are inferior beings. this is a scientific fact.

rest in comfort with that.



one of the few legitimately good sci-fi flicks in many years. many, many years.
 
l0cke said:
I know a lot of people who hate COM and a lot who loved it. I loved it, think it is a great movie. 😀
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I didn't like it. Just not that interesting. It's not even really sci-fi, it's a drama with some action/adventure thrown in. The whole "no babies" thing is just a plot device.
 
joshsquall said:
I didn't like it. Just not that interesting. It's not even really sci-fi, it's a drama with some action/adventure thrown in. The whole "no babies" thing is just a plot device.
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Yup. The most overhyped movie of the last decade. At least that I spent $ on and was very dissapointed afterwards.

I think the British were just excited that they made a half decent movie that wasn't a Bond Film or about some Historical figure. The "OMG this British movie doesn't suck!" sentiment is widespread, hence the hype and my consequent disappoint.
 
joshsquall said:
I didn't like it. Just not that interesting. It's not even really sci-fi, it's a drama with some action/adventure thrown in. The whole "no babies" thing is just a plot device.
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it's actually about as perfect as Sci Fi can get on film. I only forward to you the opinions of some respected Sci Fi writers.

A mentor of mine back in college (sci fi author), feels that it stands next to 2001 as the best examples of Sci Fi film.
 
zinfamous said:
it's actually about as perfect as Sci Fi can get on film. I only forward to you the opinions of some respected Sci Fi writers.

A mentor of mine back in college (sci fi author), feels that it stands next to 2001 as the best examples of Sci Fi film.
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I guess people must feel that a sci fi film has do with with teleportation and lasers and spaceships and such.
 
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pray4mojo said:
I guess people must feel that a sci fi film has do with with teleportation and lasers and spaceships and such.
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there are certainly different genres, and I've always felt that that stuff was more concerned with un-reality, and more focused on things like action and mumbo jumbo than it was with character, plot, ...the general uses of science as a means of commenting on current issues.

probably b/c HG Wells did a lot of the latter quite well by focusing on the un-reality, and so it stuck.

But then Arthur C Clark, Dick, and a few others came along and opened up something a bit different: real science, real possibility, if not slightly unreal, but modern and current enough to feel possible. Most people called it "literary Sci Fi," and honestly, it stands up much better to real science than Star Trek or the Matrix ever could and to me, that just makes it a more legitimate use of science as a means of allegory.

There are a couple of tenets that can be easily parsed out of this work to recognize it, kind of like a mindless checklist, but it works:

1. the time and setting are not too far off so as to feel current.

Setting something in the year 2345 or 3whatever+ displaces the audience. It's a simple trope that allows you to say "well, that's enough time to assume that all of this technology very might well exist, damn the fact that we'd need to abandon all that we currently know about physics for it to happen!"
But when you make the time period ~10-20 years in the future, you have currency. It's easier to feel familiar with the world, the audience isn't being asked to suspend too much belief to accept the world of the story; and when married with an acceptable progression of technology, all the better.

2. Real science...and a surprisingly small amount of science/technology

like with the first bit, the more you force the audience to accept a fundamental re-education of what we currently accept as scientific thought, the further you are pushing away from science. If anything, you want to tweak a few things here and there, maybe subtle impossibilities that the general audience won't need to stretch themselves to accept, let alone recognize as being anathema to current dogma. (such as the many ways in which the technology and understanding of DNA is pushed beyond reality in current TV and film...but it's still mostly acceptable and believable as fiction; b/c we all understand the simple premise of DNA, and its use)
In films like the Matrix, the essential science and philosophy at its core are overly exploited and pushed so far beyond its acceptable scope, that it ceases to become a vehicle for character and plot, but an excuse for crazy action sequences. The Matrix is simply a different kind of film--more fantasy/action than sci-fi. (compare Alien and Aliens--sure both take a huge leap in their worlds, but the two are very, very different types of film. You could almost see Hitchcock doing the first one.)

for a much better interpretation of the same essential trope as the Matrix, watch The 13th Floor. I can't recommend this enough to people, as it seems that almost no one saw it, released in the theaters concurrently with The Matrix. It represents everything the Matrix does not as a film, and as they are in many ways telling the same story, is a great way to see the differences between action/fantasy sci-fi and literary sci fi.

there are a few other key elements...but it's been about 8 years now since I was more seriously invested in this stuff 😀

I tend to think that those who claim flicks like this or CoM are bad, or not real science fiction, simply don't know that what they like is something very different: fantasy and action...or they haven't been exposed to as much film and/or literature as some of us ( the minority 😀) have. ...and they just don't know what the piece is about, frankly, b/c they tend to interpret every movie they approach as a ~2 hour piece of entertainment that should distract me for that time and release me the same way i came in.
this is fine, of course, if that's your thing. and it's really the only way to enjoy most of the big blockbusters. the thing is you simply can't approach a flick like, well, ...the Godfather, or CoM, thinking that's what the film is meant to do. You're missing the point. For a lot of film (well, historically, we are seeing less and less of this in major release), there is far more going on than mindless entertainment. If one doesn't see that and appreciate it, they accuse it of being "boring or stupid," when the reality is they simply have no idea what they are watching and simply "not getting."

In the end it's all about taste. the majority seem to confuse my opinions with something they call "elitism," when it's simply nothing more than someone whose done a bit more work, been a bit more exposed with this stuff than the average Joe, and so I approach it differently. I'd like more and more to see the same things that I and others see, but I know that ain't gonna happen...and that's fine. I just laugh when people defend ignorance by calling the other guy "elitist." 😉

(and by "ignorance," I mean acceptable, comfortable ignorance. Different people invest their time, mind, cash with different pursuits. Of course some do nothing useful with these resources, but that's a different argument 😀)
 
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